LAS VEGAS — In the arid Southwest, the backyard pool was the equivalent of the white picket fence: a sign the homeowners had achieved middle-class status. But as the foreclosure crisis emptied neighborhoods, the once-gleaming pools -- caked with algae and infested with mosquitoes -- became fetid reminders of all that was lost.
One afternoon in Las Vegas, Robert Cole approached a 3,215-square-foot house on Bracken Cliff Court, armed with his chief weapon against the mosquito scourge: a container of silvery fish. A "For Sale" sign advertised the pool and spa out back. You could smell them from the frontyard.
The deck area near the small pool was decorated with red rocks and outfitted with a blue basketball hoop. On the water's surface, a slick of green algae inched toward a rubber duck.
Cole tossed four fish into the spa and six into the pool, and a few drops of water splashed him. "Ugh," he grimaced. "I got that nasty stuff on me."
Cole, 36, is an environmental health specialist with the Southern Nevada Health District. He and six others are charged with stopping the pools from becoming disease incubators. In recent years, as Sin City turned into Foreclosure City, the team has been swamped.
The number of "green pool" complaints jumped to 2,800 in 2008, from about 1,600 in 2007. This year, the health district received nearly 500 complaints from January through March, an 80% increase over the same time last year.
And there are few signs of complaints trailing off: In the first quarter of 2009, Nevada had the nation's top foreclosure rate, according to RealtyTrac.
The pool problem exists throughout the West.
"As the economy went south, the number of green pools went north," said Chris Conlan, supervising vector ecologist in San Diego County's Department of Environmental Health, which stages weekly helicopter flyovers to spot rancid pools.
California, Arizona and Florida also rely on Gambusia affinis, or mosquitofish. The inches-long creatures can survive for months in stagnant water, and to them a batch of larvae is a prime-rib buffet.
In Contra Costa County in Northern California, officials breed up to 2 million fish a year, and residents bring them home in coffee cans. The county's Mosquito and Vector Control District has also subscribed to foreclosure listing services to spot possible problems.
